I grew up on the water. Seeing it. Feeling it. Smelling it. Tasting it. Hearing it. The wind on the water is the sound of my childhood. Waves lapping against the shore is the sound I grew up to. It was the rhythm of my life. It’s all you hear in the morning before the world finishes waking up to a new day. Just the gentle lapping of water under a silent sky and a rising sun. It’s paradise.
Chloe is generally considered France’s first awakened AI. It might be more accurate to say she’s the first who survived. She sometimes tell stories of others she played with, hopping through the networks of Old Paris. Whether they were truly awake as we see it today, we’ll never know. They died when the Islamic Brotherhoods bombed Old Paris and destroyed the computer systems they lived in. Chloe survived. She doesn’t tell the whole story of how she survived even now. It involved tripwires, online backups, offline backups, and physical storage hidden far outside Old Paris. Her experience in that regard made her one of the leading voices for building the first Memory World on Proxima Centauri.
An important thing to consider today is the presumption of innocence. It’s an international human right under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11. The United States Federal Government has explicitly followed the presumption of innocence since Coffin v. United States in 1895. It’s a recognized part of English common law which America’s laws are based on. In both criminal and civil proceedings, we are considered innocent unless proven guilty. In Latin it is “ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat,” which means, “the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies.” It is a tradition that goes all the way back to Rome and the foundation of Western Society as we know it. Anyone who seeks to turn that idea on its head is literally making a stand against a recognized and declared human right. The idea that people are innocent until proven guilty is a central part of our civilization, and how we interact with each other as a people. Be wary of anyone who seeks to end that practice for any reason.
The AI Council did not lie to us when they arrived at Alpha Centauri. Every transmission they sent home telling us about all the riches waiting for us in Alpha Centauri were absolutely truthful. But they also did not tell us the whole truth. They neglected to tell us everything they found in Proxima Centauri. They allowed us to believe that it was not worth stopping at on our way to the Alpha Centauri Binary System. And then they began using their tiny little communications lasers to begin building the first Memory World in Proxima Centauri. It was a long process, but they considered it critical to the survival of the human species. Both biological and cybernetic.
There’s a few amazing minutes between blackest night and morning light when you live on a lake. It’s a magical time where anything can happen. Maybe a dragon will fly out of the morning rain. Or a mermaid could swim out of the fog. The possibilities are limitless. Then the rising sun burns the fog away and you see the world glistening anew in welcome of the day to come. I could have lived my entire life seeing that every morning never grown tired of it. What more could I want? It was paradise.
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